ALL IFS ARE BIG

 
Mark Costello's novel Big If is a superb and unforgiving comedy of American life involving a low-level Secret Service agent who must get reacquainted with her estranged computer-genius brother when she takes a respite from the paranoid twists and turns of her nerve-rattling job. This is a book of richly skewed characters doing their best to make sense of their lives, or at least have their lives take on a fleeting semblance of normality. The quests, individual and collective, aren't what anyone would expect—this novel takes a hard left turn from the Anne Tyler/Paulo Coelho fictions that insert everyday mysticism into the complications of city life—and the results are habits, tics, behaviors, and alienation from self that come close to home, in the heart of the nest: the bedroom, the dining room, the kitchen, the places one lives the most and gains small satisfactions or walls themselves off to unreachable Siberias of the psyche.

In many ways, this is one of the best novels to investigate what one might do in the absence of God, or even a convenient social construction of The Public Good. All points of reference in Big If are minimized and negotiated from relevance. Costello's prose is alive with the things of our life, and is superb at demonstrating the clash between the happiness material items promise and the world that denies such rewards. He is the master of setting forth a metaphor and letting it travel through a storyline just beneath the surface, operating silently, mostly invisibly, always effectively.

Their father, in the first portion of the book, is a moderate Republican insurance investigator of scholarly reading habits who happens to be a principled atheist. You cannot have both insurance, the practice of placing a monetary remuneration on unavoidable disaster, and assurance, which has religion promising protection from evil and disaster. The children, in turn, assume careers that seem to typify the dualism their father opposed, son Jens becoming a programmer for the Big If online game for which he writes "monster behavior code" that attempts to outsmart human players and have them meet a hypothetical destruction. Daughter Vi, conversely, becomes a Secret Service agent, schooled in the theory encoded in The Certainties, a set of writings that lays out the details, nuances, and psychology of extreme protection. These are world views in collision, and Costello's prose is quick with the telling detail, the flashing insight, the cutting remark.

The problem, of course, is that no one can define what "good" is. Big If is quite good, and what makes it work is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small-town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired, while also providing the rich detailing of the other Secret Service agents who work with Vi Asplund. There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us." Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rationale, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field. Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details, his comic touches. A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex-husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me." She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks.

The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things, the small frustrations as much as the larger disasters, that conspire against our happiness. On view in Big If are different models on which characters try to contain, control, or explain the relentless capriciousness of Life as it unfolds, constructs through which characters and the country and culture they serve can feel empowered to control their fate in a meaningful universe. The punchline is that Life goes on anyway, with its fluctuating, undulating, chaotic dynamics that only occasionally seem to fall into place. Costello wrests a subtle comedy of manners from the small failures of anyone's world view to suitably make their existence unproblematic. This is a family comedy on a par with The Wapshot Chronicle, but in an America that is suddenly global, an air that makes even the most familiar things seem alien and fantastic.

DAVE MARSH, RIP

 

Dave Marsh—co-founder of Creem, perpetual combatant, and over five decades one of American rock criticism’s most uncompromising and infuriating voices—died August 22 at seventy-six. For nearly as long as he waged his wars on the culture, I fought him in my head. Yet his passing leaves an unexpected, jagged void, forcing a reckoning with an influence I was once too stubborn to admit. In 1969, at Monroe Music on Livernois Avenue in Detroit, I picked up my first issue of Creem and collided with Marsh’s bull-headed prose. From that moment on, he became my fixed point of resistance. To read him was to encounter an immovable wall of certitude—bombastic, frequently wrong-headed, but fiercely, urgently alive. I spent years sharpening my own syntax against his, fashioning counter-arguments to whatever decree or excommunication he had handed down in Creem, Rolling Stone, or Rock and Roll Confidential. In trying to tear down his house, I accidentally built my own.He was, as Alfred Kazin famously wrote of Norman Mailer, "...the necessary man to have around". Marsh refused to treat rock and roll as a mere stylistic playground or a commodity to be sanitized by polite society; to him, it was a crude, democratic instrument for forcing raw American experience into blunt words and hard chords. His endless crusade against the gentrification of the music was a moral demand, reminding anyone holding a pen why this noise mattered in the first place: because beneath the fashion and the polish, it still gets down.

NORMAN FINDS HIS CENTER

 
Nothing beats a great pair of legs, or so Norman assumed all his time at the laundry mat. He gazed through a misted window and contemplated the tubed contours of a backward neon sign that read "SUDS".

Nothing beats a great pair of legs he thought again, and as the washing machine hustled into its spin cycle while creating a vertigo blur of orbiting hues forged together in accelerated clockwise movement he percieved through the door's window, Norman considered all his previous ideas about what were the apex formations of things in this world and now regarded the washing machine as magnificence that couldn't be matched by anything.

Not even the best grilled ear kabob could top this phenomena. It would worth noting that this at night in a place called Landslide, an old mining town nestled in a barely wide enough crevice in the Arizona Rocky Mountains. The bars were letting out and the local drunks were making their way to the twenty four laundry mat. Two sotted fellows appeared in the doorway and immediately tore the "Suds" sign out of the window. Glass and sparks everywhere. Norman went back to staring at the spinning clothes in the washing machine window.

COOVER SNEAKS UP ON YOU

 
Robert Coover stands among the most compelling figures of that postwar vanguard of metafictionists—the writer who leaps to mind whenever one visualizes narrative machinery being systematically dismantled and reassembled in maddeningly novel configurations. Spanking the Maid is a deliciously skewed exercise: Coover takes a thoroughly threadbare scenario of erotic dominance and endlessly retells, reshapes, and reformulates it while remaining perversely faithful to the classical spine of erotic writing. The thrill, as ever, lies not in the messy payoff, but in the excruciating deferral—in the taut, agonized suspense suspended between subjects. Coover converts that delay into a terrifying vacuum where sensory perception offers no foothold for self-empowerment.As for The Universal Baseball Association, it comes as close to the Great American Novel as anything of genuine consequence published over the last half-century—or at least anything I have encountered. Meanwhile, The Origin of the Brunists possesses a terrifying potency; Coover’s rendering of apocalyptic cultishness is every bit as formidable as DeLillo’s or Pynchon’s, and perhaps, in its relentless obsession, even more so.

a paragraph on "Two Heads" by Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Airplane are a sadly underdiscussed band from the Sixties, an amalgam of varied musical personalities—jazz basslines, bracing electric guitar from a player of folk-blues origin, two equally bracing singers burning through harmonies that influenced (no doubt) the dueling warbles of X's Exene and John Doe. Jefferson Airplane was odd, political, anarchistic, experimental, electrifying in their literacy, and genuinely nonconformist. Not every odd trick they put forth worked—they could be as precious and self-gratifying as any Laurel Canyon minstrel—but in their best period, from Jefferson Airplane Takes Off (1966) to Volunteers (1969), they were gloriously wide open to opportunities to subvert audience expectations. This one, written and sung by Grace Slick, is one of those songs that has continued to ring and resonate in my memory since I first heard it on their After Bathing at Baxter's album in 1967. An utterly strange song, with a revolving Middle Eastern tonality that loops insinuatingly between choruses. An unusual time signature, not busy or virtuosic in the conventional sense, but precisely placed, slightly behind the bass: you're reminded that drummer Spencer Dryden had a jazz background and understood the odd time signature. Words and music by Grace Slick, stanzas conveying something like what it must be like meeting yourself in the thick of a problematic acid trip, and, of course, a very odd and splendidly hooky song structure. There are many snippets of what must be going through a first-time acid taker's brain that it simulates the literal idea of sliding deep down a rabbit hole.

I nominate Slick as a candidate for more serious scholarship about her songwriting and musicianship.

MUDDY WATERS IN WOODSTOCK

 

I spent dozens of hours breaking down and learning his harmonica work on "Broke My Baby's Heart" and "New Walking Blues". Wonderful, wonderful blues playing, with perhaps the best band he ever formed. If you haven't already, check out the obscure Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. The album is a revelation, as it has Waters stepping a few steps back from the rocking, Chicago style backbeat, raw and blistering in a fashion only genius can achieve, and here taking up a swing upbeat. 

Save for the rumblings of Waters' voice, always a place of deep echo and lean-close innuendo, some of these tracks would fit in well with the suited urbanity of B.B.King. It is a gem alright, a rousing, spirited transitional session placing Waters beyond his stylistic comfort zone. But not too far. Pinetop Perkins provides a bright piano throughout, and former Band utility musician Garth Hudson is a triple threat here on organ, saxophone, and accordion; his accordion work, surprisingly, is a wonderful blues instrument, as can be heard on the sturdy workouts on "Going Down to Main Street", "Caldonia".Whatever jokes the instrument and its players have suffered at the hands of one comedian over the decades abates somewhat with Hudson's finely fingered boogie and sparkling fills. What caught my ear was the harmonica playing of the late Paul Butterfield; perhaps among the handful of truly important blues harpists, his playing here equals his best efforts. Punchy, fleet, gutty and clean in the same breath, Butterfield demonstrates his mastery of tone and phrase, combining moaning raunch and inspiring single-note runs for maximum effect. 

Butterfield fans ought to acquire this disc straight away; it's an essential addition to your  collection. This is a terrific addition to his previous collaboration with Waters, the stomping Fathers, and Sons. For Waters, he is relaxed, at ease, in full command of his singularly masterful voice; within that limited range he can raise the voice to its breaking point, emphasizing a point, highlighting a hurt, suggesting a rebellion against what brings him down, and then slide to the lowest corner of his range and provide the gritty realism that is his hallmark as a blues artist. There's also a generous portion of Waters' slide guitar work, a perfect compliment to Bob Margolin's stinging bends and blurs; Water's touch is sure and spare, producing a thin, nervous, clear line. It is a wonderful texture in a full-bodied, hard-swinging band. A battler, a lover, a philosopher of the hard road, never with self-pity, never without it.

PROG SLOGS

 

King Crimson

Progressive rock has never been a genre that inspires much enthusiasm, even though Frank Zappa's instrumental records and the vast majority of King Crimson's discography stand among the most outstanding and influential releases ever to fall under the ever-expanding and increasingly ambiguous label of "rock" music. These albums have remained consistently vital, continuing to sound fresh and inventive rather than fading into irrelevance or becoming mere artifacts of a bygone era.

Repeated listens to albums such as The Grand Wazoo or Larks' Tongues in Aspic—even after all these years—still inspire lengthy essays exploring the rich musical ideas captured in recordings that are now nearly fifty years old. The enduring freshness and relevance of these works, which have withstood countless shifts in musical trends, passing fashions, and fleeting fads, can be attributed to the singular vision that Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp brought to the Mothers of Invention and King Crimson, respectively. Each led with remarkable independence, shaping the identity of his band through restless experimentation and a relentless pursuit of new sounds and ideas. Although their musical approaches were distinctly their own—each band forging a unique sonic identity—they shared a fearless willingness, over several decades, to transform their artistic direction. Neither Zappa nor Fripp hesitated to change styles, adopt unconventional strategies, explore unfamiliar musical territory, or pivot toward new artistic horizons whenever curiosity demanded it. Both bands possess recognizable hallmarks—signature techniques, stylistic quirks, and recurring musical traits—but anyone listening carefully can trace the wild, unpredictable evolution that defines the history of each ensemble.

Artists of this kind—those who never stop challenging themselves, who constantly seek new ideas and sonic experiences, and who approach every creative endeavor with a clear sense of purpose—continue to fascinate. Especially compelling are musicians who enter unexplored musical territory with deliberate intent, absorbing, transforming, and ultimately reinventing the sounds they encounter. Not every artist working within the broad world of rock music is capable of doing so. Progressive rock began—and, for the most part, remained—a musical field defined by a relatively narrow set of ideas: complex time signatures, lengthy instrumental passages, references to classical compositions, and, all too often, overwrought reflections on philosophical and spiritual themes delivered in pretentious poetic language. Musically, the genre initially generated genuine excitement and intrigue. It was adventurous and challenging, sometimes to the point of lifting the phonograph's tonearm simply to skip the vocal sections and move directly to the intricate instrumental passages that followed. Yet after only a handful of years, much of the music began to blur together, with different bands revisiting the same territory and recycling ideas that had already been thoroughly explored. In doing so, they established their own conventions and repeatedly relied upon them, often to diminishing artistic effect. The personal breaking point came with Tales from Topographic Oceans, Yes's sprawling double album, which somehow managed to be even more sluggish and ponderous than the slowest recordings by Pink Floyd.

The lyrics, unfortunately, reached new heights of insufferability. They were grandiose, impenetrable, and saturated with platitudes masquerading as profound insight, promising little more than the illusion of a transformative experience. The only real miracle, as far as this listener was concerned, was that the album eventually ended—that there was, in fact, a final side, a concluding track, and a last note, after which it became possible to return to the real world, where clear thinking once again prevailed.There are, of course, numerous exceptions to this general skepticism about progressive rock. However, the genre itself holds less appeal than those individual artists whose work continues to surprise, challenge, and engage by refusing to stand still.

WHEN LESTER BANGS STOPPED LOVING LOU REED

 

The infamous and almost comically bitter feud between Lester Bangs and Lou Reed remains one of rock criticism's most entertaining soap operas, endlessly dissected by readers and critics with a taste for the dramatic. I have to tip my hat—perhaps with some eye-rolling—to Greil Marcus for including Bangs's over-the-top, detail-obsessed account of their ongoing squabbles and ego clashes in Psychotic Reactions , a collection that gives us front-row seats to the freak show of personalities and philosophies behind the music. Bangs was practically in love with the existential, dead-end fatalism that the Velvet Underground and the Stooges turned into their own brand of musical misery—songs oozing with hopelessness and emotional wreckage. He was convinced that nothing in adult life ever rivaled the pure, unfiltered agony of a teenage boy drowning in his own overblown, melodramatic emotions, feelings so tangled and extreme that the only logical conclusion was an operatic eruption of rage and angst. Because, apparently, nobody feels feelings like a teenage boy with a guitar and a grudge.

In his writing, Bangs often soared to moments of genuine poetry and insight while decoding the music that spilled out from the ignored corners of urban and suburban sprawl. Still, for all his eloquence, he conveniently sidestepped the messier question of what actually happened when all those glorified emotions spilled over into real-world violence—whether it was self-inflicted or aimed at the nearest unlucky bystander. Back then, everyone seemed content to shine a spotlight on these feelings and call it a day, as if exposing them was a public service. But Bangs, being the endlessly restless self-examiner he was, couldn’t leave it there. As he got older, he started poking holes in his own fanboy worship of obviously damaged artists and began to question the entire cultural urge to prop these people up as icons—never mind that, in reality, their “genius” usually meant being a cautionary tale in a world supposedly trying to stay decent and humane.

These waves of second thoughts—followed by third, fourth, and probably fifth thoughts—inevitably seeped into his run-ins with Lou Reed. Reed, who inspired more ink than most monarchs, was, in Bangs's acerbic estimation, the ultimate aesthete: a walking, talking relic of the old decadent scene. Bangs, with his signature blend of admiration and exasperation, watched Reed fall headfirst into the myth of “Lou Reed,” apparently so entranced by his own legend that he couldn't resist hamming it up for the crowd. The result? Reed came off as ever more decadent, self-absorbed, and all too happy to spoon-feed his fans exactly what they expected, simply because their appetite for his myth knew no bounds.

From start to finish, Bangs was on a never-ending quest for “authenticity” in both music and motive. Eventually, however, he got a little queasy over the growing notion that the ultimate artistic statement was to go full-throttle into oblivion—to die for art, because, apparently, nothing says “commitment” like self-destruction. Bangs, to his credit, finally decided this trope was a load of nonsense, and started calling out the cultural obsession—embodied by the likes of Sylvia Plath and John Berryman—with lionizing the artist who flames out spectacularly. This newfound skepticism arrived just as Reed, ever committed to the bit, seemed to be doubling down on the whole tragic artist routine—the philosophy that art justifies any cost, and the artist’s misery (or even demise) is some kind of noble, necessary sacrifice. As if the world needed one more reason to light a candle for tortured souls with guitars.

DIAL TONE VOCALS FOR THE SQUALOR AND THE SQUALID

 

Somewhere in the digital jungle, a rock-and-roll malcontent, some leather-jacketed heretic strumming discord on the X platform, dared to spit on the sacred banana, that Warhol-stamped relic of the Velvet Underground’s first brawl with eternity. The album title said it all, The Velvet Underground and Nico, released in 1967, a crusty, rusty , crud laden slice of the New York underbelly where the junkies, the poets, the whores, the crossdressers, the street artists of all shades and ways of expression, gathered. It was a love letter to the squalor of the squalid. Headed by Lou Reed and buffeted the Euro-drone of John Cale's tuneless avant gard clamour and Nico's dial tone singing, it was the nightmare that came after the sweet dream of the summer of no-fault love . My friend was having none of that stuff, you see. .She called it overrated, a tired artifact, and I, hunched over my screen, growled like a beast cornered in a Bowery alley, muttering curses about the young who chew up history and spit out TikTok platitudes. The Velvets’ debut wasn’t just a record—it was a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the smug face of the Sixties, a sonic fistfight born not by design but by the sheer, brutal necessity of a band becoming itself, forging avant-noise like a blacksmith hammering steel in hell’s own forge. While the longhairs out West chased utopian sunsets, crooning of free love and endless horizons, and the Brits draped their riffs in centuries of aristocratic echo—blues and Berry twisted into polite rebellion—the Velvets stood apart, alien, unyielding. They didn’t beg to differ; they *were* difference incarnate, spawned in the claustrophobic gut of New York City, that teeming, screaming cauldron of 17,843,000 souls, a metropolis choking on its own ambition, commerce, and madness. Lawyers schemed, CEOs barked, junkies twitched, hookers prowled, and experimentalists—those splintered poets of the underground—scratched at the edges of sanity, all fueled by speed, smack, and a sardonic snarl. The city was a 24-hour assault, a cacophony of violence and neon, demanding you scream back or be crushed. The Velvets screamed. Their sound was no peace-and-love lullaby but a primal, minimalist howl—raw, jagged, deliberate—like a switchblade cutting through the hippie haze. Lou Reed, that street-saint of the dispossessed, turned his back on the hack tunesmith’s life, shunning the saccharine babble of flower-power bards. His lyrics were a blade, spare and sharp, slicing open the city’s underbelly: suicide, dope, the shadowed lives of queers in a world that wished them erased. This wasn’t art for art’s sake, not some Laurel Canyon daydream spun by pampered troubadours. It was war, a dispatch from the front lines of a New York that gave you all the vibes you could choke on—then dared you to survive.

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SYNDICATE OF SOUND

 

The ongoing fascination with garage rock, the music created by young American teens in the 60s in emulation of British bands and West Coast Psychedelia, has a much to do with the aesthetic value that arose from the crude approximations of an earlier trend, and, most certainly, the realit of the lyric universe those one shot wonders were creating. Emotions were not poetically expressed , not disguised in  faux philosophy or glittering generalities. It was raw-dog honestly, simply put, self-centered and loud. In other words, it was perfectly teenage, juvenile angst. I remember, as I was a teen once myself. Heartbreaks were existential crisises of the grossest sort, and they happened frequently. Seems not much has changed since I've survived my worst thinking and behavior since then.

There's palpable misogyny in a lot of the hits by one-hit wonders and garage bands in general. "Hey Joe," the old standby favored by bands in the '60s (my favorite version is by the Byrds from their 1966 album Fifth Dimension)—wherein a man solves a relationship problem with a gun and seemingly brags about it—is the most notable example. Thankfully, most of the other teen-male "women are bitches" material does not end in murder. It was more like the young man howling equal amounts of rage and regret at the moon, wishing the entire universe would swallow him whole to rid itself of the cuckold's moans and swear words. "Little Girl" by the Syndicate of Sound is a bit different; it is neither a revenge fantasy nor a case of making the woman evil and mean-spirited. It’s simply the testimony of a rejected suitor, aimed at the girl in question, detailing how their roles have been reversed. She rejected him and gossiped about him to all her friends, but now she is persona non grata among her peers—friendless, alone, a pariah. It is a perfect high school drama: so venal, petty, and intensely felt. It’s a wonder how odd life’s lessons turn out during lunch period. It is a great song with a killer guitar intro, galloping drums, and monotonic, "talk-sung" vocals delivered with a tossed-off reading of the lyrics that makes you imagine a smirk.

SNOBSTERISM IN ROCK WRITING

 

Of interest, I think, is a symposium of sorts about music versus lyrics and what different listeners, writers, and editors prefer. I like to think that I've been a combination of both, but it's evident in my record reviews that I like to spend some time discussing and critiquing lyrics if I think doing so adds to making a point—a hangover from my Literature grad student days. 

The reason I started writing reviews fifty or so years ago was that lyrics were coming into their own as an art form, in a way, with the arrival of Dylan, Simon, Cohen, and Mitchell on the rock side of things. It was pretty much the standard to listen to both the music and read the lyrics at the same time, and to consider that both words and music combined to make a whole aesthetic object that would be far less intriguing, provocative, worthy of contemplation, and replaying if either were missing. Rock tunes without solid lyrics and an effective singer tend to be bland and generic, grinding through simple chords, and rock lyrics on paper, read without music, don't read well and certainly don't scan well. The unaccompanied lyrics, in fact, lack rhythm and sway, have no real meter being the metronome; they sound stupid, banal, and pretentious, in large measure, without the music. So I concentrated on both and, as I delved deeper into the literary canon during literature graduate work, became pickier about what I would find merit in. My standard became so high that I dismissed nearly entire genres because the words didn't meet approval. 

I generally dislike the host of progressive rock bands like Yes, ELP, and many others because the lyrics were the worst sort of poetry—the tripe one finds in high school poetry magazines. Over time, I loosened up as my tastes in music broadened, finding merit in lyricists who had no intention of writing in a manner like Dylan. What I seek these days are lyrics attached to catchy melodies, refrains, and the rest that are direct, freshly stated, unburdened by literary freight or ready-made cliché, and which fit the expression and emotion of the tune.